Unofficial news and tips about Google

March 28, 2007

Yahoo Mail, with Unlimited Storage

Yahoo Blog announces that Yahoo Mail will have unlimited storage. They'll be rolling this out over a few months, starting from May.

The official explanation is that the cost of storage dropped and users send more attachments. "We have been closely monitoring average usage. We are comfortable that our users are far under 1 gig(abyte), on average. What we see are an increasing number of rich media files as consumers send more photos."

They even offer a history of Yahoo Mail, in terms of storage, but here's the real timeline:

2004April 1: Gmail launches with 1 GB of free storage (invitation-only)June 15: Yahoo Mail upgrades to 100 MB. Yahoo buys OddPost next month to make the first important UI transformation.

2005April 1: Gmail doubles the storage: 2 GB. They also launch the Infinity+1 storage plan: each day the storage increases with a small quota (that dropped from 3.456 MB at that time to 0.33 MB now).Late April: Yahoo Mail has 1 GB.

Of course that very few people have gigabyte-sized mailboxes and this is more like a marketing gimmick, but Yahoo's announcement marks the first time since Gmail launch when Yahoo Mail makes the first move and is about to become better than the competition. We'll have to wait and see if Sergey Brin changes his mind and amends the plan that Google "will start selling additional storage capacity to e-mail users with extraordinary needs".

Meanwhile, Gmail had serious performance problems at least three times this month, mostly for Google Apps users. "All three incidents this month have affected an undetermined subset of Google Apps users, including those on the Premier version of the suite, who pay a fee that grants them a service-level commitment from Google of 99.99 percent uptime."

11 comments:

But whatever. This is a great step for Yahoo. They finally beat Google to the punch though they did steal the idea from Google. I am going to test and see how much crap they will let me keep when they remove the cap. I want to see if they are going to hold true.

A good move from Yahoo for webmail users generally. And the new Yahoo Beta UI is very good generally, albeit a little slow compared to either Gmail or the classic Yahoo Mail interface.

However, storage space is not the killer move it once used to be, imho. If Yahoo really want to grab eyeballs they need to introduce Flickr-style tagging to emails instead of the old-style folders method of management. That is where Gmail has scored from the start; that and the conversation view for long running discussions via email. Until Yahoo move in those directions, Gmail has little to fear in the way of progressive competition.

And how many more years will we have to wait until we see the next stages of the Yahoo Mail Beta rollout, in particular their next version of Calendar? This Mail Beta development of theirs is in danger of threatening Vista in terms of delayed time taken before finally seeing the light of day.

I wonder if it has something to do with Rediffmail, which announced unlimited storage last month. Rediff is popular in India, though their only USP is their unlimited storage. They have never really done much to look into complaints of poor performance and poorly copied UI.

I have had a Gmail account since the first week of it's launch. I am a heavy email user and with many attachments etc. I have not come anywhere close to filling my 2.8GB of Gmail space. Most people I know with Gmail accounts are using about 1% of their storage.

Unlimited storage is not enough for me to give up the plethora of Google services at this price point (FREE).

Now that Yahoo is unlimited in mailbox size, no need to be limited by the attachment 10MB file size, you can send any file with any file size to your email account with a simple right click and send file (including yahoo). The freeware will automatically split and merge the file. You can also send whole folders to your email account as it will zip them up. The software is called Backup To EMail and you can download it from http://emailer.zapto.org

I would welcome having unlimited storage for my Gmail. Currently, I am approaching 50% of capacity and just talked with some folks in my IT group about what to do. A solution is to create another Gmail address and forward email from my current Gmail address. Given this option, it is crazy to have a storage limit for Gmail!

I did like the new yahoo mail interface. I think there should be both folders and tags for email. and archive folder in gmail is very useful feature. Yahoo didn't went unlimited for me. Did anyone got unlimited storage?